Site Mobile Navigation

Houshang Golshiri, 63, Writer Who Spoke Out in Iran, Dies

Houshang Golshiri, one of Iran's leading secular writers and a prominent advocate of free speech and human rights in his homeland, died on June 5 in Tehran. He was 63 and lived in Tehran.

The cause was meningitis, said a friend, Abbas Milani, who teaches at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, Calif.

Mr. Golshiri wrote fiction, essays and literary criticism. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, professor of Persian language and literature at the University of Washington, said that beginning in 1982, ''when the new Islamic republic of Iran began its campaign of terror'' against intellectuals who departed from Islamic orthodoxy, his work could not be published in Iran.

But Professor Karimi-Hakkak said that Mr. Golshiri's work had been ''tolerated there'' since the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997, which ushered in a more permissive political climate.

He was a leader in efforts to revive the Iranian Writers' Association. ''For his part in this effort,'' said Professor Milani, who is chairman of his college's history and political science department, Mr. Golshiri ''had to face not only the overt threats of the Islamic regime but the covert, murderous work of its death squads.''

In 1998 several intellectuals were slain by what the current government said were rogue elements in the ministry of intelligence.

The killings led Mr. Golshiri's sympathizers to fear that he, too, would be slain.

''Writers still feel the threat of murder,'' Mr. Golshiri said in an interview last year.

Mr. Golshiri ''was definitely the most significant sophisticated fiction writer of his generation in Iran,'' Professor Karimi-Hakkak said. ''His works were urbane, complicated and extremely intricate in their narrative technique. Those of us who study Persian literature from an academic vantage point consider him a lasting voice in 20th-century Persian fiction.''

Mr. Golshiri was particularly admired for his novel ''Prince Ehtejab,'' which came out in Iran in the mid-1960's.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In the book, Professor Milani said, the author ''captured, more poignantly than any other Persian novelist, the pathos and pathologies of Iran's traditional society.''

The novel was made into an Iranian movie that won praise in the United States.

Professor Milani said Mr. Golshiri was also the author of ''King of the Benighted,'' a critical novella about Iranian prisons, which has been published, under the pseudonym Manuchehr Irani, only in the United States (1990), in a translation by Professor Milani, and in Germany.

Mr. Golshiri was born in southern Iran, the son of a blue-collar worker in the oil industry, and received a bachelor's degree in Iranian literature from the University of Isfahan.

He went on to be, in the 1960's, one of the original founders of the writers' association. In 1971 he was briefly imprisoned by the government of Iran's last shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, for having been active in the association, which voiced opposition to the shah, and for writing short stories that the government considered a veiled form of political opposition.

Some of the association's members were arrested during the shah's reign, and as a result it went out of existence for some years in the 1970's.

Mr. Golshiri was one of the leaders of an attempt to revive it in 1979. In 1980, however, the new Islamic regime dismantled the association, which had criticized it for censorship of newspapers and for torture in prisons, and did not allow the organization to be active again.

After Mr. Khatami became president, the association was revived again some months ago, with Mr. Golshiri as one of its leaders.

He is survived by his wife, the former Farzaneh Taheri, who is a translator; and a daughter, Gazal, and a son, Barbad, both of Tehran.

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on June 12, 2000, on Page B00007 of the National edition with the headline: Houshang Golshiri, 63, Writer Who Spoke Out in Iran, Dies. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe